Page 65

I remember this: broken clouds scudding overhead, a strange, muted ring spiraling in my ears. Dirt beneath my nails. A hand on my heart, then my neck.

Patrick’s face. Gunner’s.

Time lagged. I heard speech disconnected from lips, felt touch long after fingers were gone. I blinked, but darkness lingered.

“Nina!”

“She took too much gas to the head. Give her a minute.”

“She held up the whole hill, Gun. The whole fuckin’ thing.”

“I know, Pat.”

“Nina, can you hear me? No, don’t get up. Just lie there a minute. Breathe.”

I thought I might lie there for an eternity. Let those clouds sail by while I slept and slept and slept. My limbs had never felt heavier, less familiar.

But slowly, the rest trickled in. I smelled the gas on the air. I frowned at Patrick’s tormented face. “How many?” I tried to ask, and it seemed he heard it.

He sighed. Relief slackened his face. Gunner slapped him on the shoulder and smiled. “See? She’s all right.”

“How many?” I asked again.

Patrick was close enough that I could count flecks in his irises, spaces between lashes. “All of them, Nina,” he told me. “You got them all out.”

Then he pressed his lips to mine, with no mind paid to his brother beside him, and I felt the warmth flow from him into me.

When he drew back, I saw something new in his expression. A sunbeam in all that darkness.

I wondered if it was a picture I’d ever be adept enough to paint. Clouds, skies, muddied skin, and a man who might be, at that very instant, declining into love.

“Take her home for me, Gunner. Please.”

Gunner nodded without argument. His arm slipped beneath my knees.

“I can walk,” I said, though when I sat upright everything tilted, the world slipping sideways off a plate.

“It’s the gas,” Patrick said unnecessarily. “Gunner will carry you.”

“No, he won’t,” I protested.

“He will. And you’ll let him.”

I groaned. “You aren’t coming?”

“I need to stay,” he said. “There were others caught under the mud in the slide. Some unaccounted for.”

“They’ll be dead by now.”

“Aye,” Gunner answered. “But it would’ve been half the parish without you, Harrow, myself included. Know that.”

My throat constricted, the trembling earth and screams and pounding feet returning to me. Those poor people. Tears pricked at my eyes.

Patrick took my chin in his hand, the grit on the pads of his thumbs pressing into my skin. “Breathe,” he said. A command. “I’ll come find you after.”

After he dug up those bodies. Delivered them to their families. A sob escaped.

He was nothing but blue eyes, a strong grip. “No fallin’ apart until I get back. You hear me?”

“Y-yes,” I answered, mind still awash, the ache in my throat dulling.

“You go and rest. Wait for me.”

Yes , I thought as he faded into shadow. Of course I’ll wait.

I awoke in Colson’s to the clamor of many voices, the uneven gait of Gunner, the scratch of his shirt buttons against my cheek.

“Gunner! You’re alive!”

“How many came up, Gun? We heard from Donny they all got out. But it can’t be true, can it?”

“Who’s that? Is that the Charmer ?”

“Nina?” This last voice was the only familiar one. Theo. “Good god. Nina! ”

I was suddenly jostled. Gunner grunted. “Watch it, Teddy! You want me to fuckin’ drop her?”

“What happened to her?”

“Nothin’. Just got a bit of gas rattlin’ round her head. She’ll be good as new in a couple hours. Leave her be.”

I groaned. Tried to force my eyelids to open.

“Give her to me,” Theo persisted, incensed. “I’ll take her.”

“Get out of the fuckin’ way, Ted.”

“Stop,” I tried to say, but it was barely a whisper. I blinked at the underside of Gunner’s beard, then at Theo. “Put me down. I’ll walk.”

Theo’s face flushed. His pupils dilated. “What happened to her?” he repeated.

“She saved a whole lot of people, that’s what,” Gunner grunted.

Theo’s eyes pierced mine. “You went into a collapsing mine ?” he asked, as though I were a reckless child.

“She held up the whole fuckin’ hill, you little shit,” Gunner spat. “Get out o’ the way.”

“I said I’d take her.” Theo made to pull me from Gunner’s arms.

“Put me down .”

“You wanna keep all your teeth, Teddy?”

“For God’s sake !” came another recognizable voice. This one harsher. Tess Colson came into view, the cords of her throat tight and pulsing. “Put the girl down . She’s not a grenade.”

Gunner sighed deeply, grumbled something beneath his breath. Theo released his hold on me and allowed Gunner to settle my feet on the ground.

I stood on loose limbs. “Thank you.”

“Get out o’ my sight, boys,” Tess said, though her eyes were pinned on me. “And Gunner, leave the Charmer boy alone. Pat’s orders, as you well know.”

“She’s unsteady on her feet, Ma—”

“I’ve got her.” And her stare cut so severely, that no further argument could possibly be broached. Gunner rolled his eyes, sneered at Theodore, and dropped my wrist from his grasp. “I ought to thank you, Nina,” he told me, inclining his head. “I was thinkin’ I’d die down there.”

And though he said it to me, I was sure I saw Tess’s chin wobble, her eyes gloss over.

By the time Gunner turned to face his mother, it had gone.

She patted him on the shoulder as he passed by, averting her eyes, and Gunner paused to lay a swift kiss in her hair.

“I’m all right, Ma. You ain’t gotta cry. ”

“Go home,” she warned him. “Now.”

“Nina,” Theo said, “let me get you upst—”

“Off you go, Charmer,” Tess said cuttingly, knocking her shoulder into his arm as she passed. “Surely there’s some other way you can make yourself useful.”

Tess took my elbow, and before I could glance at Theo again, she ushered me through the swinging door.

Her arm went around my waist as we ascended the stairs, and I at least had the wherewithal to hide my surprise.

“Come on, darlin’,” she motioned, allowing me to lean my full weight against her side.

On the third flight, she cleared her throat, adjusting my arm across her shoulders. “Is it true?” she asked. “You stopped that landslide?”

I tried not to think of the weight of the hill on top of me. “Of course,” I said. “I had to.”

“Hmm,” she said, and nothing more.

In room number fifteen, Tess deposited me gingerly onto the bed, then turned the mismatched knobs over the bath, filling it first with steaming water, then cool.

She helped me out of my dirt-encrusted dress.

She held my hands as I lowered myself into the water.

The scowl it seemed she’d been born with never left her face.

“Tip your head back,” she instructed, then doused my hair with a pitcher. I suppressed a moan at the mercy of it. To feel the grime slipping free of my skin. To luxuriate.

Somewhere in the trenches of my memory, my mother had done as Tess Colson did. She combed fingers through the snarls of my hair. She added scented oil to the water. I closed my eyes, half there in Scurry, half here in Kenton.

“The gas don’t linger too long,” Tess said, perhaps as softly as she was capable of. “The room will stop spinnin’ soon.”

“It’s not the gas,” I replied. “I’ve just overextended myself.”

When Tess didn’t reply, I almost slipped away into sleep. The water lapped at my throat. She washed the mud from my hair. My ears filled with nothing but a gentle rhythmic pulsing.

“I’ve always envied Artisans,” she said suddenly.

It was a curious enough comment for me to lift my eyelids. “ You envy Artisans?”

“You sound surprised,” Tess smirked. “Don’t all Artisans assume we Crafters envy them?”

I delayed my reply. It seemed important to get it right. “Artisans are arrogant by nature,” I said. “They believe even the sky envies them.”

“You don’t count yourself among ’em?”

“No,” I said simply, chewing over my next words. “I… I know your son has the Alchemist holed up somewhere. And that the Union managed to steal a certain amount of terranium in the South.”

Tess’s eyebrow quirked. “Is there a question in there?”

“Have you never been tempted to take some idium for yourself? Surely Patrick would—”

“I’d never allow him to waste ink on an old woman like me,” she said easily. “There’s not much in reserve. Very little, in fact, and Pat doesn’t trust many people.”

I considered what her words could mean.

Tess tipped warm water over the crown of my head again. “My son said you were there with him at his siphonin’—that you found the idium together.”

I couldn’t quite interpret the intensity in her gaze. “Yes.”

“Only you picked the Artisan ink, eh? And you stayed in the city.”

I frowned. Nodded. I wondered if an insult were to follow. How dare a Crafter girl betray her very blood?

But Tess sighed. “I would’ve done the same, in your shoes.

There was a time I would’ve swallowed anything to get me out of this place.

” She grimaced, replaced the pitcher to the floor.

“You look around Old Kenton now, and you wouldn’t recognize it.

But once, it was just soot and misery. I was jealous of the Artisans in their sparklin’ buildings.

Jealous of their other finery, too. The dresses and coaches and balls and feasts.

Their magic. It all seemed like such a dream, didn’t it? You must’ve imagined the same.”

I nodded but didn’t speak.

“I’ve never been to Belavere City,” she said then.

“Never left Kenton, in fact. Girls weren’t allowed to siphon when I was young, only boys, so I cut my hair with shears and tried to muscle my way onto a carriage in my brother’s clothes.

Didn’t work, of course. I was thrown out on my arse before I could make it to a seat. ”

I laughed at the story despite myself, and Tess grinned.

“Was worth a try.” She shrugged. “My best hope after that was to find a good husband. One that wasn’t quick to anger.

One that wouldn’t waste away on bad bluff.

And even if I was lucky enough to find a good man, it was still likely the mines would take him, like they’d taken my father. ”

“And then you met John Colson?” I guessed.